In the turbulence surrounding Seth Rogen and James Franco’s “The Interview” emerged a stereotypical, well, Rogen-Franco movie full of frat-boy humor — not a movie worth intense political debate and hackings.
After the debacle in which Sony hesitated to release the film due to pressures from international hackers, canceled the New York premiere and eventually decided to release the film online in a seemingly act of defiance, Sony has profited big time. The movie (which has a rating of 51 percent on Rotten Tomatoes) raked in $18 million, The New York Times reported, and $15 million of that was from online sales only.
Did the controversy surrounding its release bolster sales? I’ll go ahead and venture to say yes. People who otherwise would not have watched the movie now had easy access to it and were probably drawn to it, if not for the unwarranted political turmoil then for the fact that even President Barack Obama got involved. In early December, the president said he wished Sony had discussed the release with him, mentioning that he thought Sony should have released the movie, according to the Huffington Post.
But would the president have approved the movie with close-ups of Rogen’s boner, unoriginal jokes that play off of stereotypes, another movie that plays into Westerners’ ideas of foreign countries? In the face of the threats of “9/11-like violence,” I would hope not.
The problem with “The Interview” is not that it is brainless comedy — I didn’t expect anything more from it. The problem here lies in the fact that Sony had an opportunity to educate Westerners about the severity of the situation in North Korea and completely flopped. Yes, famine was depicted, and yes, the lavish life of the dictator was shown, but for a movie that resulted in Sony workers’ private information being leaked by hackers, you would hope that the violation of privacy was somehow warranted.
When North Korean defector Kim Joo-il watched the movie, he told Lucy Edwards from Dazed that, “It cannot help us to understand North Korean people.” Joo-il knows of the actual atrocities found in the country, because during his time in the military when he was sent to find military deserters, he also found mounds of dead bodies in train stations — people who had starved to death.
But I guess I shouldn’t have expected a sense of understanding the culture in this movie, especially once those hackers released emails between top film producers making racist jokes about our own president’s humor.
[A version of this story ran on page 8 on 1/8/2015 under the headline "'The Interview' not worth hack, debate"]
